Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

He drove through the open gates of a chain-link fence and onto a wide asphalt blacktop by the docks. Rigging clinked against mast poles, the docks creaked, waves softly slapped against the seawall. The sky was cluttered with seagulls. The water was choppy and the ugly green of oxidized copper, the line of the horizon an indistinct gray smear. It was barely daybreak, and there were fishing boats anchored at the docks, already come in from their first catch, and more in the harbor that looked to be on their way in. Peter parked the truck as close to the docks as he could, killed the engine, and stepped from the truck cab’s soporific cocoon of artificial warmth into the sharply pointed cold of the morning, made colder by the sea. Here again was that overpoweringly putrid smell of fish and brine.

He walked timidly out onto the dock with his hands crammed in his jacket pockets. The boat lurched in the water. The boat was a huge, complicated piece of machinery, rigging, nets, enormous gears for releasing and dragging up the net. Everything on it was wet and filthy. Fish everywhere, slapping their bodies, dying on the embossed sheet-metal deck. Machinery creaked, squealed, hummed. Peter could hear the fishermen working on the boat, their boots clanging on the deck, their voices shouting over the din of machines. He was nervous about approaching them. He didn’t quite know what to say, and was afraid they would make fun of him.

The dock swayed very slightly. In the boat, fishermen in caps and bright yellow foul-weather gear were sorting through fish on conveyor belts. On the conveyor belts and here and there all over the deck, fish flopped around, their mouths and gills gaping, their blank, disclike eyes seemingly looking at nothing. Peter found it a little amazing how long fish survive out of water. They take so long to die.

“Hey,” Peter called down to the fishermen on the boat from where he stood on the dock.

They hadn’t heard him.

“Uh — hey? Um—?”

One of the men looked up at him. The others kept picking through the fish with their work gloves. There were rows of big blue plastic barrels, the size of garbage cans, full of fish, lined up on the deck alongside the conveyor belts. The men tossed some of the fish into the barrels, some back into the sea, and let some move past them on the conveyor belt and fall into a hole that emptied somewhere inside the hull of the ship. There seemed to be a system.

“Good morning,” said the fisherman who had looked up at him.

“Um,” said Peter. “I’m from the biology lab at MIT? Can we have your squid?”

This last sentence felt strange in Peter’s mouth, but the fisherman was unfazed. Peter imagined fishermen as having big, bushy beards. A couple of the men on the boat did in fact have beards, but not this one. He did have a sharp New England accent, though. At least he had that.

They gave him their squid. Peter followed the fishermen’s lead during the process of getting the squid. They had done this before and were used to people from MIT coming for their bycatch.

“Where’s Emma?” said the man who’d spoken to him.

“I’m her new squid man,” said Peter, and imagined a superhero named Squidman.

They invited Peter on board. On the deck of the swaying anchored boat he stepped gingerly among the dying fish, trying not to squish them. They were gross, alive, frightening. The fishermen largely ignored him, but Peter still felt inadequate and embarrassed among them. These were men who had real jobs, really real jobs, who got up before dawn and worked with their hands and knew how to do things. These were men who knew how to operate complicated machines, who knew how to do practical, useful things, who knew how to catch fish. There were fish out there in the ocean, and these guys got in their boat and went out there and got them and brought them back. Just like that. These were men who were not easily frightened, not easily overwhelmed. Some of the fishermen looked younger than Peter, and Peter was ashamed that he was as old as he was and didn’t really know how to do anything useful.

Soon the wire handle of a heavy plastic bucket full of squid was sinking painfully into the flesh of his hooked fingers. The squid wriggled and squirmed in the bucket. Their tentacles stretched, thrashed, suckers sticking to the sides of the bucket. It was like holding a bucket full of aliens. The smell was pointedly sickening. Peter tried to breathe through his mouth. Sometimes when you see animals that are hurt or trapped, you wonder what they’re feeling. You wonder if they’re in pain, if they’re afraid. Peter found that it wasn’t easy to do that with squid. It was hard to anthropomorphize them, to project human emotions onto them. They were just too scary, too weird looking.

Peter dumped the squid into the tank on the truck and went back for another bucket, and so on, feeling less uncomfortable with the task with each bucketful. He did the same with a few other fishing boats that were docked there that morning, and began to feel like an old hand. It was fascinating to watch these animals that were so helpless and awkward when slopped together in a bucket instantly come alive when he dumped them in the water, suddenly moving with otherworldly graceful ease. He got back in the truck and began the task of following the directions in reverse, which was harder, especially in New Bedford, a town he had even less familiarity with than Cambridge — as in, none — plus he’d driven in in the dark. But he felt good now. He was at work. The fishermen had understood, and helped him, and given him their squid. He turned the radio up and found a station that played a stretch of non-suck songs, and was back on the highway, looking at the trees and black-and-white cows standing along the fences.

On the fairly long and boring drive Peter’s mind fell into patterns of thinking about Gina, the way iron filings filter themselves into magnetically predictable patterns on a vibrating surface. Last fall and winter, before things completely fell apart, Peter and Gina had been living together in a squalid apartment in a fairly sketchy area of Humboldt Park. He was working twenty, thirty hours a week at a music store in Logan Square, and Gina was going to school part-time at UIC and waitressing at a steakhouse. There was this one time, though, when it was almost the end of the fall semester for her, and Gina had invited over a friend of hers from school and his girlfriend. Peter couldn’t remember either of their names now. They’d only met that one time. They were nice people. Peter couldn’t really remember anything about them. It was a Saturday afternoon in a Chicago December, which means it was brutally cold with an arctic windchill. The weather had been flirting with the idea of snowing all day. They had all holed up in Peter and Gina’s apartment, smoking weed and drinking and playing Monopoly. Their apartment was on the second floor of a half-dilapidated wooden house that had been divided into dubiously up-to-code apartments. It was cluttered with desiccated houseplants with dust-coated leaves that the previous tenant had left, and poorly insulated and poorly heated, such that they spent that winter always draped in blankets and wearing hats inside, and had two space heaters going at once, cheap ones from the hardware store, metal boxes with grates of glowing orange filaments that hummed and made clicking and clinking noises, as if broken parts were rattling around loose inside them. And still it was fucking freezing in the apartment. Peter had landed on a trick that seemed like a good idea at first, which was to boil water. He’d been boiling a pot of water on the stove for mac and cheese, and noticed that the steam raised the room’s temperature. So he would keep a soup pot full of water boiling on the electric stove all afternoon and night until they went to sleep, filling the apartment with hot moisture, fogging it up like a bathhouse. It was strangely pleasant to breathe the warm, humid air; it felt good in the lungs and on the skin. It was probably good for all those half-dead houseplants too. One night both Peter and Gina passed out dead drunk — not an uncommon occurrence that winter — and forgot to turn the stove top off. When they woke up the next day the pot was ruined, the red coil of the stove eye having burned away all the water and then gone to work on the pot, causing the Teflon coating to crackle and peel in curdled flakes, turning the outside of the black pot a brassy reddish-brown color. The insides of the kitchen windows were glazed with sheets of ice as thick as fingers.